[Tex/LaTex] unknown language \selectlanguage{english}

Question

I'm writing my second document in latex and I'm using my universities template. But since I'm working on an English document and the template is for German papers I have to adjust the language.

...
\begin{document}
\selectlanguage{english}

but it fails with:

! Package babel Error: Unknown language `english'. Either you have
(babel) misspelled its name, it has not been installed,
(babel) or you requested it in a previous run. Fix its name,
(babel) install it or just rerun the file, respectively.

I tried to:
sudo apt-get install texlive-lang-english
and even:
sudo apt-get install texlive-lang-all

Any idea how to fix this?

Answer 1

\usepackage[english,ngerman]{babel}

Then ngerman is active at the begin of the document and you can switch to english. If you cannot change the package, then write before \documentclass:

\PassOptionsToPackage{english}{babel}
\documentclass{whatever}
...